Steep stairs to myself

It has been customary to speak of the British colonial project and its present-day reverberations in terms of cultural clash and ensuing resistance on the part of the colonised. In challenging that perspective, this study regards the concept of hybridity as historically pertinent to the first contact situation, and thus moves beyond an intercultural premise to a transcultural one in addressing the effects of Anglicisation. It posits that the contemporary parameters of identity formation in the colonially-incepted Anglophone world can best be understood as deriving from the state of „transitionality“. Since the most comprehensive treatment of „transitional identity“ is found in the self-narratives of writers located in transitionality, the genre of autobiography forms the focus of this study. As canonical autobiography theory is informed by premises found to have little relevance to „transitionality“, these highly individuated autobiographies, which stem moreover from a wide variety of global regions, are here analysed with the help of a fresh theory of autobiography. As a result, the significance of „transitional autobiography“, not only for reconsidering postcolonial theory, but also for re-conceptualisation of literary self-representation, has been brought to the fore. The initiator of Transcultural Anglophone Studies (TAS), Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn is Professor of New English Literatures and Cultures at Saarland University, Germany. Her major publications include Anthony Burgess: A Study in Character (1986), Writing Women Across Borders and Categories (ed., 2000), Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: Anglophone India and its Diasporas (ed., 2005), and Playing By The Rules of the Game (co-ed., 2008).